A number of manufacturing methods have been employed in order to make various types of bread articles, such as loaves, buns, rolls, biscuits, and breadsticks, from a sheet of dough. In such high volume manufacturing systems, a sheet of bread dough may typically be extruded, reduced, and provided to a conveyor that conveys the sheet of dough along a dough travel path. The sheet of dough then encounters one or more cutting apparatus, such as slitter wheels, guillotine-type cutters, reciprocating head cutters, or rotatable drum-type cutters. Such cutters, traditionally, have employed very thin or sharp cutting edges in order to cut the dough. For instance, many such cutting edges are only approximately 1/32 of an inch thick.
However, such cuts can render aesthetically unpleasing dough pieces. For example, rather than resulting in a bun that has rounded corners and which resembles a hand-made bun, the cut bun has sharp and squared off edges which can be aesthetically undesirable. U.S. Pat. No. 6,902,754 reports a blunt edge dough cutting or dough-engaging surface that is configured to pull a first surface of the dough toward a second surface of the dough, when the cutter is impinged on the dough sheet. This device tends to pinch the two surfaces of dough together, and also, when desired, severs the dough sheet. This results in a dough product that more closely resembles a hand formed dough product, with rounded edges, rather than straight or sharply angled edges. The blunt edge dough cutting or engaging surface can achieve a high throughput while still maintaining its advantages.
In some instances, dough pieces that are formed from sheeted dough using a dough cutter may result in baked articles having an undesirable number of voids in the crumb of the baked article. This problem is particularly prevalent in small baked articles (e.g., small dinner rolls) that are prepared from white dough compositions (i.e., dough composition comprising mainly refined flour) using a blunt edge cutter. Voids in the crumb of the baked bread article are aesthetically undesirable to the consumer of the baked bread article. In view of the foregoing, a method of reducing voids in the crumb of baked articles that are prepared from white dough compositions using a blunt edge dough cutter is desirable.